DISSECTING CONTEXT COLLAPSE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: EFFECTS OF COLLISION AND COLLUSION ON OPINION EXPRESSION IN SINGAPOREAN FACEBOOK USERS

Abstract

Social network sites have radically changed the way society functions in this digital milieu. Interactive platforms like Facebook have woven itself into the everyday lives of people across the globe in various aspects such as news reading, entertainment consumption and interpersonal communication. As users become increasingly reliant on social media and expand their online network, they begin to realise the problem of context collapse brought about by the technological architecture of such websites. Social media technologies automatically collapse multiple audiences into a single setting, blurring the identity of actual audiences. In turn, users are compelled to imagine their audience when sharing content online. This undeniably creates profound complications to their self-presentational concerns and, more importantly, their opinion expression behaviour regarding critical social issues. Guided by the O-S-R-O-R framework, this study investigates how Facebook users navigate through highly public spaces with potentially large and invisible audiences as they balance performing self-identity and contributing to social discourse about serious issues like climate change and homosexuality rights. This study focuses on the novel distinction of context collapse into context collision and context collusion on social media that is based on the individual user’s intentionality to compress and communicate with different contacts simultaneously. Interviews were conducted with 30 Facebook users in Singapore, recruited through purposive sampling. Findings reveal that depending on the type of collapse users expect, they present different rationales during the reasoning process and employ numerous specific communication strategies to express themselves in the outcome orientation.